Day 2 morning - internet woes

Went to bed at 10 pm yesterday, which means I woke up at 6 am and couldn't fall asleep again. Huh, I never had this problem back during working days. :P

Anyway, made myself my daily cup of 板蓝根 using boiled bottled water and went to check the internet for updates. Apparently, facebook is blocked, even the http://zh-cn.facebook.com/ local site. As is imageshack (can't see the pics of my previous entries anymore). So what am I gonna do for uploading photos real-time? WTF China. o_O

Add: I managed to get into imageshack using http proxies found on google. However no http proxy so far will get me into facebook. A lot of proxy sites are apparently blocked to. Anyone can find me a old style proxy service or free vpn service (not on my work laptop) I can use to get around the Great Firewall of China?

Add2: Hm...it seems that a lot of proxy services can get me to more minor sites like imageshack. But the minute I try to access facebook, that proxy isn't usable anymore for any other site, including non-blocked sites like yahoo. Wow, they really are serious about restricting facebook.

Day 2 Evening - French & British Concessions

Oww, my feet, they ache, and it's not even going to be the worst day I'm going to spend on them. T_T

This morning we visited the French Concession area of Shanghai. We were introduced to the tiny alleyways in Shanghai that are comparable to the Hutongs of Beijing. There were also a lot of art students in the area doing sketches of the architecture. I took a peek over some of their shoulders, and these girls are *good*. Then again, typical asian artists I've seen online (eg. doujin artists and fan artists) are typically insanely good at what they do.

Then we did a drive-by of the Expo (which we will be visiting tomorrow). Following that, we visited the Yu Gardens (豫园?). My camera was busy, but I dunno how to upload those pics. There was some light sprinkles of rain - enough to need an umbrella to keep glasses/camera's from getting splatters, but not enough to get uncomfortably wet. Aside from that, the temperature was actually pretty warm. My mom managed to call me in the middle of the gardens tour. -_-

We had lunch at about 1 PM at a Teppanyaki place. Food was so-so but those places are more about the show anyway.

After lunch we visited the British Concession area near the shore of the Yangtse River, aka The Bund. We were told the area looks much better at night. So we went back for the hotel for a while and then went back to it after sundown (it was within walking distance of the hotel). And yes, the view was spectacular. Unfortunately, my camera wasn't very good at taking pictures of night-time LED lights. Something about all those sparkling lights seems to interfere heavily with the auto-focus of the camera, and though I tried fiddling with the settings, I couldn't find a focus setting that will work with them. So, I didn't really get any good pics.

On the way back we ate at a 小吃店 for some 生煎包 & 小笼包. Unfortunately they were out of 汤包. Oh well, maybe some other time.

Tomorrow we have to get up really early for the expo - as in get up at 5 AM, meaning an early bedtime as well. It's 8:30 PM here right now, and I suppose that counts as an early enough bed time. :P

Add: Oh, and I want to say it's certainly an experience to travel/tour with a pair of precocious 11 year old half-Chinese twins who're on their first visit to China. They find the darnedest things awesome, and they kept being ambushed by random passers-by for photographs. XD

Add2: Just download the photos from my digital camera and it looks like the problem wasn't just with the LED buildings. A lot of the pics have chunks of the bottom greyed out for some reason, but I can't thinking of what could have corrupted the image or caused it to have come out like that. Weird... I guess I'll need to take extra shots of future scenes, just in case some of them come out wrong. For the existing pics... eh, I guess I'll need to do some heavy duty photoshop cropping when I have the time.